And it's really unlocked a lot of stuff for me. And that's why I titled this episode, you know, get out of your own way by having a plan, because I was really getting in my own way by making decisions based on emotion or being super sort of reactive or impulsive or emotional, and sometimes they can lead to good outcomes. But on the whole, I think on average, they just generally don't, at least not for me. So today, I'm going to speak a little bit about investing, a little bit about fitness and health, a little bit about financial, personal financial management, and nothing that I'm saying today is financial advice. This really is something that you should do your own investment, your own investigation on and your own research. So let me jump into it. So I guess the background to this is that my default, especially, is to jump around a lot. I'm pretty sure I've got ADD, I've never been diagnosed, but I don't really care whether I have or I haven't, my brain sort of jumps around and follows the shiny object and I get distracted very, very easily. It also means that I'm sort of by nature, I make quite impulsive decisions. And by nature, I struggle to focus. So I've had to really develop tools and, yeah, just tools and processes to not stop this, because I think that's actually a strength when it's harnessed, but to just learn how to do it. To just learn how to kind of embrace this and use this to my advantage. And having a plan for things is definitely one of these, one of these things that I've learned to do. A mentor of mine used to tell me kind of week in and week out to stay focused and not to get distracted by all the opportunities. And of course I knew better until I didn't. And I quote Jim Collins a lot and Jim Collins in good to great actually discovers this and speaks about this, where he says, you know, with most great companies, it's not a lack of opportunity that kills them. In fact, it's too much opportunity that kills them and the inability to focus, always following the opportunities, not actually figuring out which are the best ones and then going very deep and focusing on those ones. So just because there's opportunity there doesn't necessarily need to mean that we should follow it. But again, it's a skill and an experience that teaches us which ones to follow and which ones to ignore. So like I said, you know, I kind of quote unquote new better until I didn't. And this manifested in quite a lot of ways, some of which included a couple of pretty bad investments from a business perspective, you know, following a shiny object, getting involved in a startup, finding myself, focusing a lot of time and effort and energy on said startup. And then actually not even realizing until it was a little bit too late that actually my main business was taking a knock and hurting because of how distracted I was on these other shiny objects, and then having to scramble back and focus again on the main business. And this actually happened a few times until I sort of just by sheer, you know, failure, I guess, learned that what needs to be what these I need to be really deliberate about which shiny objects I'm going to follow. It also manifested in starting new offerings within the business before we had actually nailed our core offerings. So, you know, jumping around to do new and shiny things before we had actually nailed the things that we were sort of primarily focused on resulting in kind of just doing everything badly. Another one is just being very unclear about our positioning and this is very common in business is trying to be everything to everyone. And that's really just the result of not having a plan, not having focus, not having the discipline to hammer out the things that you've agreed to hammer out rather than chasing the shiny object. From an investment perspective, for me, it's resulted in a lot of impulsive investment behavior and a lot of fomoeing, you know, fear of missing art, fomoeing into investments, which very seldom have good results. So, for me, when I began to finally accept and adopt all of this is when I started reducing the chances that I was making bad decisions in business and investing, we're actually just about any part of my life, even fitness and training. And I started to try to be disciplined on investing the time upfront to develop a plan on what I'm going to do and then to stick to that plan. And at this point, you might be thinking, okay, that's cool, Mike, but what if I don't know what the right plan is and you would definitely not be alone in this thinking. In fact, to this day, I have plans for everything and I still don't know. In fact, I'm pretty certain that my plans are not the best possible plans. But that's okay. And in my experience, it's better to start with a plan and then to stick to the plan and then to observe the plan and then very importantly, to adjust the plan when it becomes clear that it needs to be adjusted. The critical thing here is two parts. One, never deviate outside of your plan, but two and equally important, be completely open to adjusting and changing the plan when you need to. And those two things are not the same. One is being undisciplined and going, oh, you know what, I'm just going to do this anyway, outside of your plan. The other one is going, oh, that's interesting. The environment, my information, the market, the situation, something has changed and I need to shift the plan to adapt to the change. So the two sort of critical rules here for me are never step outside the plan. And the other one is change the plan whenever you need to and whenever it makes sense. So let me walk you through some examples in my life. And again, this is definitely not financial advice. And a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about here is actually not sort of real. It's more just sort of, for example. So I have a pretty deep interest and passion and a bit of a hobby in crypto investing. So I'm not a trader. I don't trade at all. But in other words, what I mean is I pretty much just buy and hold crypto assets of Bitcoin, Ethereum, that kind of thing. And this is probably one of the best examples of where having a plan is so critically important because it is so hard not to jump into FOMO investments and to buy emotionally and to follow the hype and to freak out or get excited. It's such a great example of where a plan is just so important. And I haven't always had a plan. That's for sure. I've made money. I've lost money. But only sort of relatively recently, I'd say maybe in the last year and a half-ish, maybe two years, have I had a plan and it's been a hell of a lot better for me.